All Chapters of My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The call came at two seventeen on a Thursday afternoon.Roman was mid-sentence in a contract review when Hartwell rang through on the direct line. Hartwell only used the direct line when something could not wait."Sir. We lost the Draven bid."Roman set his pen down. "By how much?""Four percent above our ceiling. Whoever came in knew exactly where our limit sat and cleared it cleanly.""Who submitted the offer?"A short pause. "Montague Industries. Seraphina Montague personally signed it."Roman said nothing. Outside his office window, the city moved through its ordinary afternoon. Thirty-two floors down, traffic shifted through an intersection. Up here, the only sound was the air system and the specific quality of silence that followed information landing in a room."Thank you, Hartwell." He ended the call.He sat with the Draven file open in front of him. Mixed-use commercial property, west side, strong bones, better location. He had told Isabella about it two weeks ago over dinner

The board meeting was Tuesday at nine.Roman lost the thread at nine twenty-two.Hartwell was mid-sentence about Q3 projections and Roman was looking at the numbers on the page in front of him and they were not moving through him the way numbers normally did. He found the right column a beat too late. By the time he had it, Hartwell had already redirected the room's attention to the slide on the far wall, covering the pause so cleanly that if you were not watching Roman specifically you would not have caught it.Everyone had been watching Roman specifically.He knew because of the way nobody looked at him directly for the next four minutes. The careful, collective attention of a room that has noticed something and decided not to name it.He pulled himself back. Finished the meeting on schedule. Said the right things. But Hartwell stopped by his office afterward with a file he did not need to deliver in person, stood for a moment longer than the file required, and Roman said: "I'm fine

Garrett left at ten fifteen.Roman sat in his office until eleven. The folder was open on the desk. He had read the timeline four times. The numbers were not going to change and the dates were not going to move and the name at the bottom of the intervention trail was not going to become someone else's.He told Priya he was done for the day. She didn't ask questions. She had stopped asking questions two weeks ago.The penthouse was empty. Isabella had lunch until three. He went to his study, sat in the chair he'd been sitting in most nights lately, and began to go through it properly. All of it. In order.She had known about Isabella before she filed.He was certain of this now in the way you became certain about things once you stopped trying not to be. The timeline made it undeniable. She had known, and she had taken whatever time she needed with that, and then she had started the paperwork. And then, while the paperwork was in preparation, while she was already quietly dismantling h

Ada's message came through the internal system at two fourteen.*Roman Ashford in the lobby. No appointment. Says it's important.*Sera read it at her desk. She set her pen down. She looked at the message for four seconds. Then she picked her pen back up and went back to the document she had been reviewing.She did not respond.Ada, who had worked for Sera for two years and understood the precise difference between a non-response that meant *I didn't see it* and one that meant *I saw it and that is my answer*, handled it accordingly.…Roman had been standing in the Montague lobby for six minutes when Ada appeared.He had come without calling ahead. He had known, when he made the decision to come, that this was the wrong approach. He had come anyway because he had spent the night with Garrett's file and the notebook and the voice on the phone, and he had run out of the patience required to wait for the correct approach.The lobby was the same as before. Dark wood. Old framed documents

The package arrived on a Thursday at eleven twenty.Ada brought it in without comment, set it on the corner of Sera's desk, and left. No return address on the outer wrapping. Plain brown paper, tied with twine, the kind of careful wrapping that was not accidental.Sera looked at it for a moment. Then she finished the paragraph she was on, set her pen down, and opened it.The brown paper came away in one piece. Inside was a frame. Simple, dark wood, expensive in the way things were expensive when someone had taken time to choose rather than defaulting to the obvious. She turned it over.Their wedding photo.She had not seen it in a long time. Three years of marriage and it had never been displayed in the penthouse. It had existed somewhere, she supposed, in a box or a drawer, the way things existed when nobody decided what to do with them. She had not looked for it when she left. She had not thought about it.She looked at it now.They were both looking at the camera. She was twenty-th